


Hallowed Ground

by shinelikethunder (tenlittlebullets)



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Church Sex, Come as Lube, Comfort Sex, Gallows Humor, HYDRA Trash Party, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Misappropriated Religious Imagery, No Healing Cock, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Torture, Rape Aftermath, Scars, Sloppy Seconds, Steve/Stoicism OTP, Unwholesome Recovery Fic, Virginity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-07
Updated: 2015-04-07
Packaged: 2018-03-21 16:28:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3699134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenlittlebullets/pseuds/shinelikethunder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky thinks about cleaning guns, or doing field maintenance on his arm, and tries to pretend he's repairing something delicate as he traces the lines of violence carved into Steve's flesh.</p>
<p>It'd be nice to believe that's what he's doing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hallowed Ground

_But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract._

* * *

Anyone but Bucky would think Steve was being all Captain America about it.

It's a two-mile hike from the flaming ruins of the Hydra storage facility to the abandoned building where a couple of Bucky's ex-KGB contacts have agreed to pick them up. Steve doesn't say a word or break stride the entire time. He's got himself all wrapped up in his dignity like it's an extra set of clothes that can't be torn off him, marching along with his back straight and his shoulders square and not the slightest hitch in his gait. And sure, Bucky gets why people look at Steve and think "inspiring national icon." It's a look that sits well on him. But right now, all Bucky can see when he looks at Steve is the grimy, bloody-nosed fourth grader Bucky scraped out of a back-alley garbage heap after Billy Myers beat the snot out of him. Defiant little twerp wouldn't even let Bucky lend him his jacket to hide the mess. Walked home with his head held high and his shirtfront smeared with ash and blood and dog shit, and stared down anyone who looked at him funny like he was daring them to ask how he came by his red badge of courage. "Okay, so I got in a fight and lost. So what?" he'd said later. "You tell someone your grandpa lost a leg at Antietam, they gonna care what color uniform he was wearing?"

Bucky doesn't remember what he told Steve's dumb ass in reply. Probably that a missing leg wasn't like going out in public with dog shit on your collar.

Which, for the record, is a principle he's still willing to stand by, and the stains in question right now are arguably even grosser than dog shit. It's not about which is _worse_. Given a choice between losing another limb and letting another pack of Hydra mooks pass him around like a fleshlight, Bucky would take the dishonorable way out any day. But only one of those makes him feel sick, and even sicker at the thought of anyone else seeing it. Steve can clutch his dignity as tight as he wants if it helps him cope, but that doesn't...

Christ.

Steve shouldn't have to figure out how to cope with this.

It's just plain fucking wrong. It should've been Bucky. It's his shady past, after all—he should've been the one sneaking down into the bowels of the building, past the cryo tank and the chair prototype, to grab the documents they needed on the creation of the Winter Soldier. But he'd let Steve pack him off with the C-4 to rig the whole place to blow—hell, he'd practically jumped at the chance to wipe that shithole off the map himself—and left Steve to tackle the basement alone. 

Should've realized it was all too easy. Should've picked up on the signs that the base wasn't as abandoned as it looked. Should've gone right back in when Steve missed the rendez-vous instead of waiting around with his thumb up his ass. Giant pile of should'ves.

He can still almost see the afterimage when he closes his eyes. Like it's seared onto his retinas. All he'd had to do in the end was follow the trail of blood and bodies, but at the end of it was Steve's shield, propped casually up against the cryo tank. A pack of beat-up ex-STRIKE thugs looking murderous and a gaggle of scientists arguing in Russian about what should go in the IV drip. Steve in that _fucking chair_ thrashing against the super-soldier-grade restraints. And behind him, meticulously laid out for display on a steel table, a greatest-hits compilation of the tools they'd used to break Bucky down and keep the Winter Soldier in line.

It's a single frozen moment in Bucky's memory: the split second after he'd rounded the corner into cryo storage and before he'd started mowing them down like the well-trained killing machine he still is. He hadn't even been able to take it all in at first. Which he knows because after the last body fell and he snapped out of it and saw the state Steve was in, he had to rewind to that first moment and force himself to make sense of the details. The chair backrest lowered to horizontal, the legs spread wide apart and locked, and some Hydra rat in a lab coat standing between them. And Brock fucking Rumlow holding a cloth over Steve's nose and mouth and pouring water on his face. The guy in the lab coat was dead on the floor with his dick still hanging out of his pants, but Rumlow wasn't among the bodies. Bucky doesn't even remember how he escaped.

The carnage itself is kind of a blur. He'd been on autopilot. Most of his brain had been taken up by the steel table, the awful specificity of it, and the gut-churning realization that whatever trap Steve had walked into, it'd been laid out with Bucky in mind. Obviously they hadn't turned up their noses at the prize they'd caught instead, but it should've been Bucky in that chair.

Would've been old hat for him. Giant nasty headache of an old hat, especially when he'd just been starting to let himself get possessive about his body again, but that's just more proof that he can bounce back from it.

And Steve? Who the fuck knows how Steve is doing under that look of pensive determination. Not even Bucky can tell, and that's saying something.

Up ahead he can see the stream Dmitri told them about when he gave them directions. All they have to do now is follow along beside it for another mile or so. Steve pauses on the bank when they reach it, staring into the water.

"I can keep lookout," Bucky says, hanging back. "If you wanna wash off."

Steve stands transfixed a few seconds too long, and the pause stretches out into awkwardness before he shakes his head and turns away. "Nah. Probably just melted last week. I'll wait until I can get a hot bath."

Right. A hot bath. Bucky hasn't known Steve all that long in the future, relatively speaking. But he does know that after a lifetime of kitchen bathtubs in shitty tenements with a five-minute supply of warm water on a good day, Steve _loves_ modern showers. It'd been the subject of their first domestic squabble of the 21st century, a surreal experience for both of them. Bucky lets out a humorless laugh. "Bet you never thought you'd thank me for vetoing the apartment that didn't have a tub, huh?"

Steve actually smiles. It's faint, and it doesn't reach his eyes, but it's there. "Did you hear someone thanking you?" he says, just to be an ass. "You should get your hearing checked out. It was a nice apartment."

"Yeah, with a postage stamp for a bathroom."

To Bucky's surprise, Steve closes his eyes, mumbles, "Jerk," with obvious affection, and pulls him in for a quick kiss before setting off again. Huh. He would've expected that to be off the table entirely. It's a close-mouthed press of the lips, and even that much contact has left Steve's ears burning and the rest of his face pale, but just like the subject of their first lovers' spat, it's the normalcy of it that's bizarre. Especially with Steve staring at the water like it's an enemy he has to square off against.

They tramp along beside the stream for a few more minutes before Bucky can bring himself to say, "I still get twitchy, sometimes. About having water dumped on my face. Don't know if you guessed that's why I didn't want the one with just the shower stall. Rumlow always loved that fake drowning shit—I think he heard stories off a buddy at Gitmo and wanted to join the fun."

That brings Steve up short. "Rumlow waterboarded you?"

"Yeah, after I went rogue on a mission in Newark and couldn't remember where I'd been. The docs called off the questioning after a while, said it was some dissociative fugue state memory thing. Too much brain damage. I think it was just Jersey."

"I trained with him," Steve says, picking up the pace and not looking at Bucky, his voice tight with suppressed anger. There's a small wet patch on the seat of his pants. Bucky hurries to keep up so he doesn't end up staring at it. "He knew exactly how long I could hold my breath. Hauled me out of the Piscataqua once, when I got my first lungful of cold water since the Valkyrie and kind of blanked out. I figured that was why he went straight for the ice water once he was done with my ass. But I guess it wasn't really that personal."

Bucky's heart sinks. So Rumlow'd had a turn too. It had been naive to hope that the fuckface in the lab coat had been the only one. Even if he'd shot his load in sheer terror when Bucky stormed in, one guy couldn't really account for the mess Bucky glimpsed before he found the release switch for the restraints. He'd been hoping anyway, because gang rapes are the fucking _worst_ , a whole different level of demoralizing than some lone pervert deciding to take advantage, but why is he surprised? It's STRIKE; all those bastards think of their dicks as just another weapon.

The reminder of the Valkyrie thing must be fucking Steve up real bad, if he'd rather carry the residue of _that_ around with him than get near the water. Bucky isn't even going to pretend to understand. He remembers most of his near-death experiences fondly, the way he remembers his escape attempts. And the cryo-freezing process, well, it's no picnic, but it was usually a reprieve from everything else. Sure, some distant part of him still remembers the terror of freefall and the agony of Bucky Barnes' mortal remains clinging to life in a frigid mountain gorge. The rest of him is busy looking back at that broken body and going, _You poor sucker, you don't even know how much you're gonna regret waking up_.

Maybe the water's got nothing to do with it, though, and this is just another round of Billy Myers and the garbage heap. Steve picks himself back up, spits on anyone who thinks he should be ashamed of the mess, and walks away none the worse for wear. Must be nice. Sorry for thinking the gang rape might've fucked you up, Steve. Sorry for fixating. Sorry for letting them break me and put me back together wrong, a little nastier, a little more violent and corrupted. But shit, if it's the opposite, and Steve only looks fine now because it's too horrific for him to even start dealing with yet, what would he say if he could hear Bucky thinking about it so casually? 

Everything would be so much simpler if it had been Bucky instead. What's one more round to someone who's already lost count a long time ago? It could've stayed his sordid little issue to wrestle with in private and try not to let it sully anything he had with Steve. None of this was ever supposed to touch Steve.

"You think this is it?" says Steve.

Bucky jerks out of his thoughts and looks up. The stream is now skirting the edge of a clearing in the woods, and in the middle, lit up in the warm light of late afternoon, are the remains of a church. The patchy white plaster of the walls has almost completely worn away to reveal the red brick beneath, which is starting to crumble away at one end of the building. The skeleton of the central onion dome is showing through in places. The whole place is graffitied and overgrown with vines and scrub brush, but one end of it does look relatively intact. "Dmitri said first gap in the woods we come to," Bucky says with a shrug, and starts tramping through the long grass towards the church. "And there's a road," he calls back to Steve when he's far enough out of the woods to see it. This far out into the middle of nowhere, that's a strong point in favor of it being the pickup location.

Inside, the bare, echoing simplicity of the place is kind of creepy. The plastering, though in better shape than the outside, has still chipped away to show naked brick in places, and time has faded and defaced the murals of saints that once lined the walls. The sanctuary's empty and exposed, the wall of icons that would once have screened it from the masses stripped away. The State probably confiscated anything of value back in the Soviet days and left the place to rot. If so, joke's on them. The desecrated shell of the church feels more unearthly than any cathedral Bucky's ever seen.

Steve makes the circuit of the place in silence, trailing his fingers over the cracked and battered walls. His face is still unreadable. Bucky, trailing after him, can see that the wet patch on the back of his jeans has grown. Just once, Steve lets slip a flash of reaction: at the entrance to a side chapel, he turns to glance inside, and Bucky can see his eyebrows rise and his step falter. Then he hurries onward without going in.

Bucky stops in front of the chapel, curious. His eyes zero in on the battered plaque over the arch first: Depot 7, Lots 36 to 50: Nerve Gases. The chapel's as empty as the rest of the church, the plaque the only evidence of the less-than-holy uses it was once put to, but Bucky's continued existence is proof enough of how thorough the Soviets were about destroying their illicit weapons. He wonders if there's ordinance buried in the churchyard, leaching poison into the soil or lying in wait for someone to step on it wrong. 

The other thing, the thing Steve probably noticed, is that the building isn't as abandoned as they thought. The far wall's got a relatively intact Virgin Mary painted on it, and at her feet, some determined worshiper has arranged a few icons, candles, and a pot of flowers, just starting to wilt. Ex-weapons depot or not, apparently someone still finds the place sacred enough to pray here.

Across the nave, Steve is standing silhouetted in front of the opposite chapel, a ghostly faded Mary Magdalene rising over his head. "Looks like a good spot to settle in for the night," he says. Bucky goes over to join him and gives a jerky nod of agreement. It's one of the more structurally sound parts of the building, and the empty windowframes are overgrown with vines, shielding them from view but allowing them a glimpse of the road through the foliage. 

There's a ledge running along the wall at windowsill height. Bucky picks the side wall that'll let him keep an eye on both the building entrance and the windows, and takes a seat. Steve props his shield up in the more-exposed window and settles down next to him, stiffly but without wincing. It's a narrow wall. They're neither of them tiny. Bucky tries to slide away and give Steve some space, but Steve stops him with a hand on his knee. "Stay," he says softly.

So Bucky stays there with his shoulder and leg pressed lightly against Steve's, trying not to watch Steve stare holes in the floor. After a while he shucks off his leather jacket and uses his right shirtsleeve to start cleaning the worst of the blood out of the crevices of his metal hand.

Steve unzips his own jacket, pulls the documents out of an inside pocket, and starts rifling through them. They're all in code, evenly spaced columns of Cyrillic letters marching down the page and spelling out gibberish. "Hope they're worth it," Steve says quietly.

Bucky doesn't say the first thing that comes to mind, which is that nothing is worth the price Steve paid for them and trying to put a price on it at all is fucked-up. That's not Bucky's call to make. Putting a price on a human life is fucked-up, but humans find things worth laying down their lives for all the damn time. Steve's the one who gets to weigh the value of his own sacrifice, and Steve will be the first to point that out if Bucky mouths off about it. 

And Steve probably does see it as a sacrifice, not a load of meaningless, unnecessary suffering for no better reason than getting caught on the shit end of someone else's cruelty. It probably helps.

"What a clusterfuck," Bucky mutters.

Steve glances sidelong at him. "So to speak," he says dryly.

It takes Bucky a moment to get it. Then another moment to get it through his head that Steve said it on purpose. "Jesus, Rogers, I think that's the dirtiest joke I've ever heard you make."

"Call it adapting to the circumstances," Steve says with apparent serenity. But his hand is still on Bucky's knee, and his fingers have started to knead at it compulsively. His jacket is still unzipped. His shirt lost all its buttons when it was torn open, and a glimpse of his bare chest is visible in the gap. It's striped with horizontal bruises where he struggled against the torso straps. That skin looks positively unblemished, though, next to the angry red and purple welts that crisscross his whole upper body except where they're neatly interrupted by the straps. Some of them are scabbed over. One of them looks like it's started bleeding again.

Bucky swallows thickly. The single-tail whip was always the nastiest. He hates that he recognizes the marks without even having to think about it. He hates that the memories behind the knowledge raise nothing but a dull, unsurprised shame in him, while just looking at the same marks on Steve's flesh almost makes him choke with outrage. Once again he's not sure whether to feel callous, for shrugging at his own past, or weak, for losing his shit when it happens to Steve while Steve refuses to flinch.

Thing is, it _is_ an outrage when it happens to Steve, outrage he just can't summon up on his own behalf. He has to poke and prod and guess at what's going on in Steve's head because he's got no basis for comparison. The first time anyone had bothered to rape him... well, it can't have made much of an impression, because he's not even sure. He's got hazy memories of a doctor getting the bright idea to have himself some personal fun once he'd put the speculum down for the day, but by that point, whatever was left of Sergeant Barnes was too far gone to care about one more indignity on top of the endless heap.

Steve, though, Steve's still got a nice healthy sense of the sanctity of his own body. It's why Bucky's resigned himself to the role of cockblocking gatekeeper in whatever passes for their relationship. Maybe one day they would've gotten around to fucking. But Bucky's still rattled by the night they were roughhousing on the living room floor, nominally fighting over the remote control but mostly enjoying the excuse to grapple and to make out like teenagers, and they both got too turned on to think straight. He remembers suddenly noticing the hard-on jammed up against his thigh, remembers the sinking feeling and the offhand thought of _Nice going, Barnes, now you're gonna be shitting blood for a week_ , and then looking up to see Steve, flushed to his hairline and trying to fight off a dopey grin. Excited, self-conscious, radiating shy pride at what he was offering Bucky, and Bucky might be a hardened jackass but he's not enough of a monster to take Steve up on that offer. He already feels like an impostor who's slithered into Steve's bed on false pretenses, the way Steve touches him sometimes—that quiet appreciation, bordering on reverence. 

God, Steve must be in _hell_ right now.

He's touching Bucky like that now, in fact. The hand that was on Bucky's knee has shifted to the small of his back and crept upwards from there, and now Bucky realizes with a jolt that Steve's fingertips are tracing out strands in the tangle of scars radiating from his left shoulder. Steve has to press down a little to feel them through the fabric of Bucky's shirt, but his fingers are gentle and steady. He's doing it absently, without looking. Most of his attention is wrapped up in shuffling the documents on his lap and photographing them with his phone to send to Natasha as soon as they have internet. He looks serious. Focused. His stupid modern haircut is drying into stupid, irregular clumps of fluff.

Steve must notice Bucky looking at him out of the corner of his eye, because he pauses and looks up. "What?"

And Bucky does want to say something, he does. But if tries to talk about it, chances are whatever comes out of his mouth will just make everything hurt worse. "Your hair's sticking up funny," he says gruffly. "Looks real stupid."

Steve stares at him, expectant, because this is the point where Bucky's supposed to reach in and fix it while Steve grumbles in protest. The moment stretches out, and then a flash of—realization? hurt? resignation?—flits across Steve's face, and he raises an eyebrow and says, "Yeah? So what are you waiting for?"

Bucky tries not to breathe a sigh of relief and reaches over. "Jeez, I gotta do everything around here myself, don't I." He yanks his fingers through Steve's hair, and to his surprise, Steve butts his head right up into the touch like a cat. Some of the stern focus melts out of his face at the scratch of Bucky's fingers on his scalp. For a second he looks almost relaxed, and then his face screws up as though in pain and he sucks down a ragged breath. When he lets it out again, his guard is back up.

"Presentable now?" Steve says.

"Nah, you look like hell. But your hair's okay." Bucky gives it a final ruffle and pulls away.

Steve opens his mouth, like there's something else he wants to say, but instead he nods and gets back to work. After a couple of minutes he starts fidgeting. He keeps falling off task, eyes fixed on the documents in front of him like they'll decode themselves if he stares long enough, then darting glances at Bucky and hurriedly shuffling his papers around and diving back into his work. His hand has crept all the way up to Bucky's shoulder, thumb on the seam where metal meets flesh.

Bucky's trying to get back to cleaning his left hand, but just having Steve in his peripheral vision is enough to get him antsy by proxy. Finally he gives up. "Penny for your thoughts."

"Probably not stuff you want to hear."

"Yeah? Chances are wherever you are right now, I've been there. Try me."

Steve makes a face, but he puts the papers and phone aside and sighs. "You can touch me if you want, you know. I won't break in half."

"You want me to?"

"I want a lot of things I'm not supposed to want right now," Steve says, staring at his knees.

"Like what?" Silence. "Steve. Come on."

"Honestly?" says Steve, his face red. He makes a noise, a self-conscious little ghost of a laugh, and then draws a deep breath, sets his jaw, and takes the plunge. "I want you to screw me until I can't feel them anymore."

Bucky freezes in the act of trying to get a particularly persistent bloodstain out of his metal fingers. He shouldn't be surprised, not really. Steve's a dumbass. The instant his thoughts drifted towards the inevitable question of whether this would ruin sex for him forever, he probably triple-dog-dared himself to get fucked just to see if he could go through with it. Bucky'd figured it would take longer, is all. Like maybe until after he'd had a chance to wash off and stop actively bleeding. "I wish it worked like that, pal, but it doesn't," he says.

"To hell with how it works," Steve snaps, defensive. "I _want_ you. And hey, it's not like you have to worry about tainting me anymore. So why not?"

Not _this_ shit again. _Give me strength_ , Bucky thinks only half-ironically at one of the fading painted saints on the wall. "You think that was about you being a thirty-year-old virgin? It was about not throwing your pearls before swine, asshole. Everything I learned about screwing guys, I learned from sick fucks like Brock Rumlow. Maybe you should think about whether that's what you want to deal with right now."

The grip of Steve's hand on his left shoulder would crack bone if it weren't on metal. "Yeah," he says, his voice bitter and sharp with anger. "And now I got to learn it the same way you did, because every time I made a move on you, you couldn't trust yourself to do any better than him. Good job. We're a matched pair." There's a crack and a thump as the decrepit mortar of the ledge they're sitting on gives way under Steve's other hand and sends a small avalanche of brick and plaster tumbling to the ground.

"Sorry," Steve mutters before Bucky can muster up a response. "Sorry, that was over the line, I just..."

Bucky sighs, gives up on getting the Hydra goons' blood out of the crevices of his metal knuckles, and lays his flesh-and-blood hand on top of Steve's on his shoulder. "I know. But I'm still not gonna add myself to the pile of creeps who've stuck it in you in the past couple of hours just so you can prove some stupid point."

Steve's already rallying for a counterargument, but that knocks the wind right out of his sails. He blinks, looking genuinely bewildered. Then his lips form a silent "oh," his hand slides from Bucky's shoulder to the back of his neck, and he hauls Bucky in for a messy, open-mouthed kiss. Bucky groans, about to jerk away and tell Steve off for fighting dirty, when Steve breaks the kiss and presses his forehead to Bucky's. "This isn't about trying to prove anything, Buck," he says quietly. "You wouldn't be just another creep sticking it in me. That's why I..." He swallows, his hand tightening on the nape of Bucky's neck. His next words are pinched, like it's costing him a lot of effort to force them out. "Just... I could kinda use something that isn't _that_ right now, you know?"

"...Oh." 

Steve chuckles hollowly and kisses Bucky some more. "Yeah. Oh."

Bucky gives in and lets Steve ravish his mouth. Most of the time Steve's kisses are sweet and almost chaste, lots of lips and playful little flashes of tongue. These are filthy in a way Bucky didn't even know Steve was capable of. Before long he's got one hand tangled in Bucky's hair and the other clutching his shirt collar, and he's twisting his torso to press against Bucky's like he can meld their bodies into one if he just tongue-fucks Bucky's mouth hard enough.

"Jesus, okay, okay," Bucky gasps, and swings his feet down and stands before they both fall off the ledge. Steve shoves him up against the arched chapel entrance and kisses him some more. He's got their bodies pressed flush together, heedless of the welts all over his chest where Hydra scourged him, even though it's got to hurt like a bitch. And fuck, no mistaking it, that's his dick stiffening against Bucky's thigh. Steve's dick. Which Bucky had been trying to avert his eyes from just an hour or two ago, while he hunted for the release lever to free him from the restraints that...

Bucky tears his mouth away, gasping, feeling dizzy and vaguely sick. It doesn't matter that he only saw a few seconds of what they were doing to Steve before he went ballistic. He knows, right down to his bones, everything Steve went through; repetition and muscle memory have made it a part of him forever. 

Steve's staring down at him, managing to look painfully innocent and utterly debauched at the same time. His hair's mussed, his lips red and slightly parted. "Bucky...?"

Bucky squeezes his eyes shut and bangs his head back against the brick. "Fucking hell, Steve. It should've been me. I was the one they designed that trap for, you just..." A horrible suspicion seizes him. "Steve. Tell me you didn't know it was a trap."

Something in Steve's expression hardens; Bucky recognizes the old mulish contraction of his brow and set of his jaw, but there's a grim cast to them that isn't innocent in the least. "They've hurt you enough. They're not gonna hurt you again, not while I can stand in their way." Bucky opens his mouth to tell him off, but Steve kisses him again hard. He grabs Bucky's hands and guides them to his body, sliding them up under his shirt. Bucky hesitates. "Please," Steve whispers. "Bucky. Please, just..."

"Idiot," Bucky sighs, and shoves Steve's torn-open shirt off his shoulders. The familiar sight of his torso is eerie here in the crumbling chapel, lit in the rippling, underwater light that filters through the vines choking the windowframe. The dappled shadows of his muscles seem to shift; the bruises where he thrashed against the straps are a sickly yellowish-green around the edges in that light, the whip welts dark and tinged with washed-out purple. Bucky runs his metal thumb along one that looks like it's just scabbed over. Steve's breath hitches.

It's hard, remembering to keep his touch light, to stroke without grabbing or digging his fingers in. Years of not being expected to lay hands on anyone except to maim and kill aren't easy to erase, and the stuff he put up with on the receiving end ranged from careless to clinical to brutal. Bucky thinks about cleaning guns, or doing field maintenance on his arm, and tries to pretend he's repairing something delicate as he traces the lines of violence carved into Steve's flesh.

It'd be nice to believe that's what he's doing. But this shit's beyond anyone's ability to fix. All he can do is give Steve what he needs and pray that it wards off more damage than it causes.

Steve's shuddering and leaning greedily into Bucky's hands, chasing after any kind of touch that isn't aimed to hurt. "Want you," he mumbles. "Everywhere they were. I wanna feel you, Buck, you don't have to go easy on me."

"Yeah, I do," Bucky says flatly. "Not for you. For me."

Steve looks taken aback for a second, but then he nods, and raises a hand to stroke the side of Bucky's face with excruciating tenderness. "You know, I thought I'd have to do a lot more convincing to get you on board with this."

"What? Fucking in church while your ass hasn't even stopped bleeding yet? You've had crazier ideas. Probably."

"Maybe." Steve's mouth twists into a half-smile. "It just... I need..."

"I know, buddy, I know." Bucky's hands have worked themselves down to the waistband of Steve's jeans, and here he hesitates, no matter how much it pisses Steve off when Bucky's careful with him. If Steve's pissed off this time, he swallows it back. He cups Bucky's cheek with one hand and uses the other to pop the button on his fly himself. Bucky does the rest, tugging Steve's jeans and underwear down around his thighs.

It's not that they haven't seen each other in their birthday suits plenty of times. Just, this time's different, knowing who else has been looking. Even banged-up, Steve shirtless is sculpted and smooth as a model, but seeing the parts that don't belong on display—his genitals, the patch of fair hair between his legs—is so personal that Bucky's teeth clench with rage when he thinks too hard about it. And, Bucky realizes with a jolt, he's never seen Steve hard before. Maybe _no one's_ ever seen Steve hard before. Sure as shit didn't look like those Hydra bastards managed to get him turned on during the gang rape, which is more than Bucky can say for himself. Bucky swallows. "Can I...?"

Steve looks down at Bucky's fingers hovering inches from his erection. Bucky's face must be doing something stupidly reverent right now, because Steve doesn't even look self-conscious, just apprehensive, teetering on the edge with bated breath. "Yeah," he whispers finally, and bites his lip to hold back the noise he makes when Bucky wraps a hand around him.

This, at least, Bucky's got plenty of non-Hydra experience with, though admittedly from the opposite angle. He jerks Steve off with slow firm strokes and brings his left hand up to cradle the back of Steve's head. "I've got this memory," he says quietly, as Steve starts sighing and rocking into the rhythm of his hand. "Don't know when it's from, only that it was the first time they really went to town on me. Before that, there'd been little things, technicians copping a feel while they worked on my arm, a couple of doctors taking advantage behind closed doors. People being selfish with the power they had." Steve tenses, and Bucky brushes his metal fingertips soothingly through his hair. "Yeah, I know how you feel about that, but it didn't bother me much. Poor bastards were too pathetic to get it from anyone else, and they didn't care one way or the other how I felt about it. This other time, though. I don't even remember what I did. Just that there was a new STRIKE commander and he didn't want me to even think about doing it again. So he locked me in the chair, same way you were, and had the whole team take turns with me until they couldn't get it up anymore. It was punishment pure and simple. Had fuckall to do with getting off. Near the end one of the doctors came by, and I thought they were gonna hand me off to him to mop up their mess, but instead they just invited him to join in. And I remember watching it all from somewhere outside my body, thinking, that poor son of a bitch, I hope he gets patched up by someone who can touch him without trying to hurt him." Steve makes a wordless noise and pushes into Bucky's hand. Bucky kisses him, soft and lingering. "Afterwards I think one of the handsy technicians had a come-to-Jesus moment when he saw what they did to me. Chaste as a saint the whole time he was working. But..." The next part sticks in Bucky's throat. He knows Steve, and he knows that Steve's never stooped low enough to do anything like what Bucky did next, and probably wouldn't no matter how many decades they kept him prisoner.

Steve looks at Bucky choking on the words. He steadies him with gentle hands rubbing up and down his back, and says slowly, "But you asked him to touch you."

"Asked? Pal, I begged him."

It's one of Bucky's shameful little secrets. It doesn't even have the dignity of guilt behind it like the trail of bodies does. It's just an ugly lapse into cowardice that comes back to send prickles of humiliation down his spine whenever he starts thinking he might be worthy of having Steve's hands on him.

And Steve? Steve hears it and his lips do this awful little twist, like he's not sure whether to laugh or cry, and he says, "Well, did it help?"

"How the fuck should I know? Go find the alternate timeline where I still had some pride left and see whether it fucked the other me up more."

Steve slides his hands up under Bucky's shirt and strokes his chest, his stomach, his sides, mapping out the territory that'd been available for the slimeball tech to feel up. He kisses Bucky's forehead, and it's probably not meant as absolution but it feels like it anyway. "I... Jesus Christ, Buck, I'm just glad you're here."

"Yeah, well," Bucky mutters, not sure what he can say to that. He clears his throat. "Anyway. I'm not much good at touchy-feely, but when you mentioned why you wanted it, I figured I oughta at least try. Still not sure I can pull it off without teaching a little of what I learned from those sorry bastards, but you sing out if it hurts, okay?"

The world goes dark as Steve pulls Bucky's shirt up over his head. "I don't care if it hurts. Never have. Even when they... it never got as bad for me as it was for you." Once Bucky's shrugged the shirt off and re-emerged, Steve combs gentle fingers through his hair, as though determined to be touchy-feely enough for both of them. "And hey, I'm not exactly helpless. You cross the line, I'll have your dumb ass in a headlock before I have time to say no twice. But I, uh, I figure a little pain goes with the territory at the moment."

"Doesn't have to," says Bucky, even though he's got the sinking feeling he's stalling against the inevitable. "I've been told I'm real good with my mouth. Think I just killed half the people who could back me up on that, but I bet you're enough of a sap to take my word for it." He flashes Steve his best charming-asshole grin. "I'd even give you some pointers on how to return the favor."

"Another time," Steve says, and kisses him, his lips warm and soft on Bucky's. Bucky starts stroking him again, hoping to distract him from the dumb thing he's apparently hellbent on doing, and Steve sighs long and slow into his mouth like the sap he is, but he won't be deterred. "I want you inside me," he says, and Bucky can almost _hear_ Steve blushing as the words pass his lips, but his voice is sure. Determined.

"Jesus Christ, Steve, why? Why _now_?"

It takes Steve a long time to respond. He presses their foreheads together, taking deep breaths of Bucky's air as Bucky jerks him off, and Bucky's almost given up on getting an answer when Steve says, "Think I've wanted it for almost half my life, so right now..." He shrugs. "Kinda chaps my ass that they're the only ones who've ever done that to me."

Bucky can't help it. He laughs. He's not smiling, and his stomach's churning, but he fucking laughs. "Oh, _that's_ what's chapping your ass."

Steve actually cracks a smile. "Yeah. You gonna do anything about it or not?"

Bucky rolls his eyes and makes a grab for Steve's ass. Steve's stupid, unbelievably fucked-up, recently virgin ass. "The things I do for you, you lunkhead, I swear to God." And okay, fine, Bucky's spent more than half his life wanting to get his hands exactly where they are right now, but for fuck's sake, not like this.

A stifled shiver runs through Steve's whole body at the touch. For a few long moments he stops breathing. Then, "More," he says in a strangled voice, and buries his face in Bucky's neck as Bucky's fingers creep closer and closer to his crack. And pause there. "Keep going," Steve mumbles into Bucky's skin. Bucky can't see his face, but his ears and the back of his neck are bright red.

As lightly as he can, Bucky brushes a fingertip down the cleft of Steve's ass. Steve gasps and stiffens all over, and Bucky's stomach turns over again when his finger comes away slick. He sneaks a look at it over Steve's shoulder. There's no blood at least. Just semen. Goddammit, Bucky had been doing a really good job of not thinking about Steve dripping with the evidence of what they did to him.

"How much does it hurt?" he asks, low, not trusting his voice to stay steady otherwise.

Steve makes a dismissive noise into Bucky's neck. "Had worse cases of piles before the serum. I think my pride's sorer than my ass right now."

Which, knowing Steve, means it hurts like fuck, but Bucky's got a long and checkered history of helping Steve make any dumbass masochistic mistake he damn well pleases as long as it doesn't actually get him killed. No point stopping now. He circles a finger around Steve's abused asshole and tries not to cringe when another trickle of come leaks out of him; more of it is drying on the insides of his thighs, tacky in some places and flaky in others. Steve is shuddering and moaning in his arms. Bucky nudges him. "Promise me something."

"Not gonna promise to stop you if it hurts."

"Of course you aren't, you dumb punk. But you're gonna tell me if you're so sore it starts hurting worse than what they actually did to you. I've still got a scrap of pride left, and 'not as bad as Hydra' is a low bar to clear."

Steve pauses. "Deal," he says, and then gasps and lets loose a flood of muffled curses into Bucky's shoulder as Bucky slowly presses the tip of his finger inside him. Bucky's pretty sure he's some kind of monster for agreeing to this. He's definitely a monster for the way his cock jumps when Steve lets out a frustrated noise and pushes back onto his finger, driving it all the way in to where his insides are hot and silky and slick with come. No one's ever touched him here except to hurt him, Bucky realizes with a shiver. And now it's down to him to figure out how to do this without brutalizing Steve all over again, and he can't remember anyone ever being gentle about fingering him open when they bothered to do it at all, but he damn well tries his best.

Steve makes it easy for him at first, jerking upright all wide-eyed and startled, radiating wonder at the brand-new sensation of being entered without violence. He's such a fucking _virgin_ he almost demands you ease him into it nice and tender and torturously slow. Bucky works his finger in and out, cringing at the wet noises it makes, building up a nice solid foundation of slow-burning hatred for anyone who could desecrate Steve Rogers the way Rumlow and his thugs have done. He watches Steve's expression pass from dazed acceptance to pained concentration to outright lust. And now Steve's the one making it hard to handle him gently, kissing Bucky breathless and thrusting eagerly onto his finger, urging Bucky to give him "more, more, come _on_ , I want to take it."

Even with a single finger, it's tight, slow going at first—Bucky has no idea whether it's from pain, or the memory of resisting, or just all that time Steve spent clenched up to keep even more spunk from dripping down his thighs. Sure as hell isn't plain old virgin-tightness though; for one thing, Bucky remembers bile rising in his throat at the sight of Steve's ass gaping open in the brief glimpse he got after the gangbang, and for another, once Steve figures out how to relax he goes loose and pliant alarmingly fast. Bucky goes from wondering whether this is going to work at all to plunging his finger into a well-fucked hole that could probably fit his dick with room to spare. It's a little disconcerting to be playing with a well-fucked hole that isn't his own for once. The angle's weird. But Steve sure as hell seems to be getting off on it.

Finally, Steve tears his mouth away from Bucky's and says, "Okay, let's do this." He tugs Bucky down to the floor without further ado, kicks the rest of his own clothes off, and settles on his back, legs spread.

Bucky raises an eyebrow at him. "You realize there are other positions we could try, right?"

"So let's try 'em some other time," Steve says, and hikes his knees up.

Bucky shakes his head, muttering, "On your own head be it," under his breath, and kneels between Steve's legs. He spends a minute looking where before he could only touch. There are bloodstains after all, but none of them are fresh, thank God. Bucky runs a finger around the swollen pink rim of Steve's hole—judging by the amount of semen everywhere, Steve's ass should be utterly destroyed, but instead it just looks sore as hell. They definitely aren't going to need lube. Bucky doesn't even know how many loads those sons of bitches pumped into him, just that Steve's dripping with it, slick and messy all over after being fingered. Bucky swallows queasily. He's not sure he can go through with this.

"If it's gonna be a problem, we can wait until I've washed off and my top half's stopped looking like a horror movie poster," says Steve, sounding deeply unimpressed.

Fuck. This is revenge, isn't it, for all the times Bucky made fun of him for being more horrified by the scarring around the metal arm than Bucky was. Bucky starts fumbling with his fly. "Nah," he says hastily, "I'm fine. Sloppy seconds isn't my kink, that's all."

"How about sevenths?" Steve asks, drier than Death Valley.

Bucky winces. He pulls his half-hard dick out of his pants and stares down adversarially at it. He can do this. He's gotten it up for all the random strangers he dragged home from bars to test whether his plumbing still worked; he can get it up for Steve, for Christ's sake. How many times has he fantasized about Steve spread out beneath him desperate for Bucky's cock? And Bucky's not stupid; he knows full well that no matter how much of an abrasive shit Steve's being, no matter how much they've both dated or slept around, no matter how fucked-up and precarious their attempt at a romance is, the list of people Steve would trust to see him like this who aren't slowly succumbing to Alzheimer's in a nursing home begins and ends with Bucky Barnes. So it would be really, _really_ nice if Bucky's dick would cooperate right now.

"Hey," says Steve, his voice softening, "let me?"

That almost does it, all on its own, but Bucky still nods and leans forward so Steve can run gentle fingers over his stiffening cock. And if Steve's touches normally have a sense of reverence about them, shit, this is like Bucky's given him permission to handle a holy relic. It's almost absurd enough to make Bucky pull back and snap, _Fuck's sake, Steve, it's just a prick, and you don't even want to know where it's been_ , but Steve does know, and he touches Bucky like he's something sacred anyway. And the problem is, it's so fucking wrong that it gets Bucky going like nothing else. He glances defiantly up at the chapel wall for an extra little kick of blasphemy, or at least some confirmation that Steve's being ridiculous, but the ghostly afterimage of the Magdalene stares down at him with sickening compassion. _Sorry, lady, not judging your foot fetish, but not all of us have expensive perfume on hand_ , Bucky thinks sourly, and looks away.

He's already hard enough to get the job done when Steve sits up and leans forward. Bucky realizes where this is going about half a second before Steve's lips brush the head of his cock. "Jesus," he breathes, and stares down open-mouthed at Steve, whose eyelashes are fluttering against his cheek as he _kisses_ the tool Bucky's about to plow his already-wrecked ass with. "You don't have to--"

The look Steve flashes up at him is answer enough to that. Bucky takes deep breaths and tries to control himself as Steve's lips close around the head of his cock, as Steve's tongue swipes experimentally over the slit. 

Within ten seconds Bucky would be confident laying down money that Steve's never done this before, forced or willing. He's not really sucking Bucky off, just exploring, licking the precome off the tip of his cock and mouthing wetly up and down the shaft. A couple of times he seals his mouth around it, even trying to see how deep he can take it in without choking, but he always pulls back without seeming aware that he's teasing. By any reasonable standard of giving head, Steve's terrible at it. Bucky couldn't give less of a shit. Steve is treating his chance to get up close and personal with Bucky's cock with all the solemn devotion of a man opening his mouth for Communion, and Bucky's never been this hard in his _life_.

In fact, things are going to get messy—well, messier—if this goes on any longer. Bucky pulls away. "Ready?" he says.

Steve looks up at him. His split lip has opened back up, leaving a smear of blood on his mouth and probably on the underside of Bucky's cock. He nods and lies back, and Bucky tries not to think too hard about the trust and surrender on his face, about his blood on Bucky's body, about him lying there and letting Bucky batter him half to death—

"Do it," Steve says.

Bucky tries to be as careful as he can about pushing in. Steve still ends up throwing his head back and biting his busted lip against the pain so hard it sends a trickle of blood down his chin. "Slow," Steve gasps through hitching breaths, " _slow_ —ah—" So Bucky stops moving altogether, letting Steve's insides clench and release around him as his body tries to reject this latest intrusion, and waits it out. Eventually the spasm passes, and Steve slumps boneless on the floor and looks up at Bucky with shining eyes. "Oh," he whispers. Somehow the entire magnitude of the _fucking crazy_ thing they're doing is crammed into that single awed syllable. 

"Yeah," says Bucky, strangled.

"Bucky..." Steve reaches up to brush his fingers over Bucky's face. He tries to smile, but it's pained, and the overall effect is wretched. Probably he realizes he's only making it worse, because he laughs, just a voiceless stab of breath. "Wow." Bucky's reminded of the dopey grin when they were wrestling, Steve startled and self-conscious but practically glowing. He's still kind of glowing, even now, as he gathers up whatever tattered scraps are left of his virginity and rushes to hand them over to Bucky with his teeth gritted against the hurt. Bucky can't shake the feeling that he's sticking his dick in an open, still-bleeding wound. But Steve, at least, looks like he's managed to find a sliver of undiscovered country left to marvel at.

A trickle of come crawls down the underside of Bucky's cock, driven from Steve's body by the long, slow push into him. Steve must feel it leaking out, because he cringes and looks openly mortified for a second. Then he laughs, a real, deep, hearty laugh that makes all the muscles of his lower body contract, which just makes him laugh more when they can both feel his ass clenching around Bucky's cock. "Jesus, Buck, they thought it was going to break me," he gasps, blinking away tears, and laughs some more. "Look at us now."

"Look at us now," Bucky murmurs, shaking his head. "Using their spunk to ease the way." He hadn't thought of it as a giant middle finger to Hydra before, but it sure does make Steve smile when he says it.

Steve shifts himself around on Bucky's cock, gauging how sore he is, and Bucky groans at the sensation. What had seemed filthy before, obscene, is now pure liquid heat around a bundle of raw nerves. He has to move. Soon. But Steve's brow is still furrowed in concentration as he tests out how to allow, even welcome, all the thick unyielding flesh splitting him open. And Bucky's got no right to say anything about raw nerves, not when it's his cock prodding at all the tender places inside where Steve's been bruised and battered. So he hangs on, trembling. Once or twice Steve squeezes his eyes shut and hisses in pain. But more times than that, his eyes go wide, his lips part, and some unexpected, aching pleasure sends a little gush of pre-come dripping from the tip of his cock. Finally he's worked himself down until Bucky's in him to the hilt. He gives one last experimental wriggle, which sends another couple drops of jizz dripping slowly down Bucky's balls, and takes a deep breath. "Fuck me," Steve says, and adds, " _Slowly_ ," when Bucky allows himself a jabbing little thrust that makes Steve grimace.

So Bucky sets a rhythm that seems agonizingly slow to him, but it makes Steve writhe in some kind of masochistic ecstasy and let out breathless, needy moans that are unlike any noise Bucky's ever heard him make. At first Steve looks just as surprised about them as Bucky is, and Bucky wonders with a pang if they're unlike any noise Steve's heard himself make either. He drinks them in, watching as Steve—still covered in reminders of the bastards who've trampled on him, who've torn him open and used his miraculous body as some kind of sordid receptacle—discovers what it's like to have someone make love to him. Maybe Bucky's a sap too for calling it that. But honestly, would they do something this reckless and disgusting and flat-out insane for anything less? 

"Steve—" Bucky tries to keep his breathing steady as he works himself gently in and out of the mess inside Steve's body, trembling with the effort of holding back his body's urge to thrust. "This might be a—really short fuck." Just as well. For all Steve's eagerness, it clearly _hurts_. The longer they keep at it, the greater the chance Bucky's control will slip and he'll do some serious damage. 

Steve tangles a hand in his hair and pulls him down, digging his heels into Bucky's back as he shifts the angle so Bucky can kiss him. Bucky slides in deeper, and suddenly Steve cries out into his mouth and claws at his back. "That good or bad?" Bucky asks.

"It's... a lot." Steve slowly relaxes his hands, breathing hard. "Hurts. Reminds me of..." He shakes his head. "But it felt good too." Apparently it's an 'a lot' that Steve wants more of, because his feet press against the small of Bucky's back, pulling him in to thrust against that spot again. Bucky yields and lets Steve have the reins. He tries to follow Steve's guidance on the pace and the angle, until Steve's practically fucking himself on Bucky's cock, and _Christ_ that's hot. It seems to get Steve going too, because he grabs Bucky and kisses him wildly, letting slip another of those strange needy moans right into Bucky's mouth.

"Close," Bucky gasps, "fuck, I'm gonna—"

Steve wraps his legs around Bucky's waist and pulls him in, as deep as he can go. "Stay in me," he says, "I want to feel it. Know it's yours." He's beyond shame now, sweat-drenched and debauched, and he's so beautiful that Bucky can't help but kiss him some more. They're still kissing when Bucky lets go and climaxes, pulsing and emptying himself into Steve's body, adding one more load of come to the mess inside him. He slumps down on top of Steve without pulling out, letting Steve feel his dick start to soften.

"Hope you meant that," he slurs into Steve's chest, "because I think I just came enough for three. Jesus fucking Christ."

In response, Steve kisses Bucky's forehead and runs gentle fingers through his hair. Bucky plants a sloppy, clumsy kiss on the welt that's closest to his mouth. It makes Steve shudder and whisper, "God," and one of his hands leaves Bucky's hair so he can swipe furtively at his eyes. Bucky pretends not to see.

Eventually his cock slips out of Steve's body on its own, followed by a gush of semen. Bucky's too warm and floaty to care much, but Steve tenses up. "Hey," says Bucky, his voice coming out funny because his lips are still plastered to Steve's skin, "you okay?"

There's a long, agonizing pause. "Yeah," Steve says in a cracked, voiceless whisper that doesn't sound okay at all.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," he insists, stubborn as ever. "I'm glad we did that."

"But...?"

"I don't know. Not like it was ever going to be a miracle cure." Steve wrenches his spread legs back together and scrubs at his eyes again. His other hand comes down heavily on his chest in front of Bucky's face, fingers spreading out to cover the welts and bruises. He picks idly at one of the long thin scabs. Then his fingers clench and suddenly he's gouging at it with vicious desperation, like he can rip the marks right out of his skin.

Bucky catches his wrist and pulls his hand away. "Hey now," he says, and kisses away the thin dots of blood that have sprung up along the length of the welt. "Hey. Where's the guy who spent half the war bitching that he wouldn't have any battle scars to show off?"

Steve makes a disgusted, derisive noise. "You telling me I oughta be proud of these?"

"I'm telling you if it were me trying to claw myself to pieces, you wouldn't stand for that bullshit. And seeing as it's not me, because some idiot stepped in and took that bullet so I didn't have to, I'm taking over your job." Bucky chooses another welt, this one running down from the junction of Steve's collarbones towards his right nipple, and kisses slowly down it. "I know I've been a prick about taking it to heart when you were the one saying it to me, but now that it's the other way around, I get it. These are battle scars too. Who's to say you shouldn't be proud of 'em while they last?"

"I guess I knew that," Steve says without conviction. He lets out a noise of frustration deep in his throat that sets his chest vibrating under Bucky's cheek. "Most of the time I can keep sight of it. But right now, Buck, after we—" He shudders. "They just feel filthy. Wrong."

Bucky keeps kissing over the tangled patchwork of welts and bruises. "Yeah, I know," he admits with a sigh. "It's a bitch and a half, isn't it? Gets right under your skin. Right past your better judgement. It's why they do it. Nobody would bother if it weren't an effective weapon. The shame—it's just another scar, Steve." He pauses with his lips a few inches below Steve's sternum, and both of them shiver, feeling the ghost of the gunshot wound that should've left an ugly scar there. Steve's outright forbidden him to feel guilty for it, and Bucky's willing to take the freebie, since it's not like most of his other victims are alive enough—let alone generous enough—to absolve him. But guilt and blame aside, it was still his finger on the trigger, and he can damn well feel ashamed of that.

Very gently, he kisses that patch of skin, bruised but otherwise unblemished. Steve's abdominal muscles jump and contract under his lips. He moves downward, tracing one of the angry red lines on Steve's stomach with his tongue. "These, though," he continues, "these, the goddamn mess between your legs, fuck, I don't know, water in your lungs, any other nasty reminders of what they did to you in there—seems to me they're just as sacred as any other blood we've lost fighting to burn Hydra to the motherfucking ground."

"It's easier to see when you're saying it to someone else, isn't it?" Steve looks down at him, lips contracted into an almost-smile, and lays a hand on Bucky's metal shoulder. "Guess I'll just take your word for it."

"Damn straight you will." Bucky licks a wet, obscene line up Steve's happy trail to his navel, and that startles a gasp out of him. "Chin up, kiddo. Remember Billy Myers and the ashcans?" Obviously Steve does, because he groans and bangs his head back on the floor. "Okay, fine, Briançon. Three days' hike covered in blood, horseshit, and the slimy guts of Zola's science experiments. About as filthy as you can get, and they gave us all fucking medals as soon as they could get within ten feet of us without going woozy from the stench."

"We deserved 'em, after that."

"See? That's the spirit." Bucky leans back in to keep kissing over Steve's abdomen and something bumps into his chin. Steve lets out a startled noise. Bucky glances down at the erection bobbing just beneath his lips, then lets his eyes flick back up to Steve's face and smirks. "You know," he says, "my mouth is still on offer." It's good to know he's doing _something_ right. Steve had gone mostly soft while they were fucking—honestly, Bucky would've been shocked if he hadn't—but evidently Bucky's been making a pretty good case for his mouth and its talents over the past few minutes.

Steve's eyes are wide and fixed on Bucky's lips, his own mouth open in anticipation. "Yeah, sure, twist my arm," he says, and Bucky almost laughs at how hard he's trying and failing to sound casual.

He doesn't bother playing around like Steve did, just swallows him down and gets straight to work. It's almost a letdown at first. It should be... special, shouldn't it? Different, doing this with Steve? All the other stuff was. But Bucky was holding himself back for all that, being as careful and deliberate as he could, and it's not like he's got enough experience topping to have an established script. Here, muscle memory takes over. He's been waiting years—decades, depending on how you count—to get this intimately acquainted with Steve's dick, but at the end of the day, turns out Steve's dick isn't that different from any of the other dicks Bucky's had shoved in his face.

But then an indescribable noise tears its way out of Steve's throat, and Bucky looks up and forgets to breathe for a second. Steve's propped up on his elbows trying to stare down at what Bucky's doing, but his eyes keep rolling back and fluttering involuntarily shut. His mouth is hanging open, his chest heaving. Bucky's never seen anyone look so dazed and utterly _shocked_ by his own pleasure before. He lets his lips curl into a smile around Steve's cock, then throws himself back into his work, and this time he's got Steve's moans and gasping breaths to sustain him.

Bucky loses himself in the familiar motions of giving head for a while. He's yanked rudely back to reality when a hand curls into a fist in his hair and _tugs_ , and he can't stop the reflexive full-body flinch. He pulls his mouth off Steve's dick, his pulse hammering in his ears, and says through gritted teeth, "Don't pull my hair. Just—don't."

"The hell else was I supposed to do?" Steve snaps, and he sounds _scared_. "You weren't responding, you were just—choking yourself on it, like—"

Steve can't come up with an ending for that sentence. Bucky's pretty sure he can, even though he's a little fuzzy on the past few minutes: _like he was trying to work up as much spit as he could, because it was the only lube he was going to get_. Somehow he doesn't think that will be very reassuring. He sighs. "Sorry. I kind of... go on autopilot and zone out, sometimes. It's okay, it doesn't bother me. Just enjoy it."

The hand that had been in his hair trails down to cup his jaw. Steve tilts Bucky's face up to look at him, his grip firm and mercifully ungentle. "How'm I supposed to enjoy it if you're not there for it?"

"It feels good, genius," says Bucky, rolling his eyes.

"If that was all I wanted, I'd go find a sex toy and—" Steve must see the way Bucky stiffens all over, because he cuts himself off in a hurry.

Bucky swallows. "That's kind of what I was trained to be, pal. I'm working with what I've got here. Now, are you gonna let me use my powers for good, or what?"

Steve releases Bucky's chin and lets his hand drop to the floor. He chews on his lip. "Can you, uh... do it at all without zoning out?" he asks, suddenly diffident. Bucky frowns at him, not sure what happened to the straightforward approach, and then Steve adds, "I mean, does it always—do you ever _not_ have that hanging over you, when you—" His cheeks are going crimson.

_You'll be fine, Steve_ , Bucky wants to say. But Steve's pride has taken enough of a beating today, so he lets it drop and lets Steve keep up the pretense that Bucky's the only one he's concerned about. "Let's try it and see," he says instead.

"Take it easy, okay?" says Steve with a crooked little smile. "I don't think you'll have to work that hard to blow my mind. When I'm not about to shit myself with worry, anyway."

Bucky circles the head of Steve's cock with his tongue. "Try not to shit yourself," he says solemnly, "believe me, it'd hurt like hell," and Steve's startled bark of laughter dissolves into a moan as Bucky closes his lips around the shaft and sucks.

This time, he doesn't throw himself into it. He lingers on the head of Steve's dick, trying out obscene things to do with his tongue on the underside, and sucks him without taking him in too deep. He keeps his eyes turned upward, too, hoping the dumb faces Steve makes while he's getting sucked off will be enough to keep him from drifting off into his own head. And Steve doesn't disappoint. Watching him try with growing futility to maintain eye contact while Bucky's driving him to distraction is _amazing_.

Comedy value aside, there's something about the faces he makes in the throes of pleasure, something blissful that Bucky hasn't seen in Steve before. It takes Bucky a while to put his finger on it. It finally clicks when he realizes that for once in his damn life, Steve isn't heroically clenching his jaw against _anything_. In fact, his lips are slack and parted, and instead of scrunching up in pain or concentration, his eyes are heavy-lidded and hazy. This is Steve's first chance all evening to taste this kind of pleasure without having to brace himself against any accompanying agony—which means it's also the first time in his life. Frankly, Bucky's impressed he's held on this long.

Soon Steve is squirming eagerly underneath him, trying to push up into Bucky's mouth. Bucky's having none of that. As appealing as all the writhing is, the last thing Bucky needs right now is anyone—even Steve—thrusting a thick cock down his throat. He pins Steve's hips down firmly with his left hand.

A shudder runs through Steve's entire body, and an undignified moan slips out of his mouth. Bucky pops off long enough to say with a smirk, "You _like_ the arm, don't you." When he leans back in to keep sucking, he curls his metal fingers around the base of Steve's cock, and starts jacking him off with that hand even as he keeps working at the head with his mouth.

Steve jerks convulsively in his grip. "Bucky," he says in a strangled voice, "oh God, I'm—"

Bucky slides his metal hand down to cup Steve's balls and takes Steve's cock deeper into his mouth, further and further, until the tip hits the back of his throat and his nose is pressed into Steve's pubic hair. It's a showoff move, absolutely. But it's a practical matter too: if he can get Steve to come right down his throat, maybe he won't have to taste—

Steve finally lets go and climaxes. Bucky chokes it down as fast as he can. He still can't entirely avoid the taste, indelibly associated with surrender and humiliation, but it's not overpowering—just a bitter aftertaste, lingering in the back of his mouth. He looks up to remind himself where he is and who he's with. Steve is sprawled out on the dusty floor like he's been physically knocked flat by the force of his orgasm. Bucky smiles.

He moves up to lie half on top of Steve, keeping most of his weight on the floor in case Steve doesn't appreciate anything that feels like being held down. Steve mumbles something incoherent in protest, pulls Bucky fully on top of him, and plants a sloppy kiss on his lips. His hands settle on Bucky's back, warm and solid. His eyes are closed, his face more peaceful than Bucky's seen it in a long time.

Bucky rests his head on Steve's shoulder and lets Steve hold him for a while. He hopes—well, he's got no idea what he can hope for out of this or where they can possibly go from here. But he does hope that whatever the fuck they just did, it helps more than it hurts.

After a few minutes, Steve's fingers dig gently into Bucky's back, and he starts to stroke at the knotted-up muscles, broad slow strokes with the heels of his palms. Bucky looks up. Perhaps inevitably, the furrow of care in Steve's brow has reappeared, and his face as he looks down at Bucky is thoughtful and sad. But it's a long way from the closed-off, poorly-suppressed misery of when they first got here.

"Hey, you," says Bucky.

Steve smiles a little, but his eyes are still a long way off. "Hey," he says quietly.

"How you holding up?"

"Fine," Steve says automatically, then catches himself and shrugs. "I don't know. Not as bad as I could be." He kneads for a while at a particularly bad spot behind Bucky's left shoulderblade, looking like he's chewing on the question some more. "It's funny—it hurts worse now."

"I don't know what you expected, pal, you're the one who told me to stick it in," says Bucky, deliberately missing the point.

"No, I mean... I didn't know how bad it was when they were doing it. It was gross, but it was just another kind of torture. I guess the horror didn't really kick in until I had the real thing to compare it to."

"You were gonna find out sooner or later," says Bucky. He feels suddenly, irrationally defensive of the crazy thing Steve dragged him into. "Don't tell me you're having regrets."

"Are you kidding?" Steve says, and hugs him fiercely, squeezing so tight that Bucky can't breathe for a second. "I said it hurts more. I didn't say this wasn't the right thing to do."

Bucky kisses him, and Steve returns the kiss with bruising enthusiasm. Before long they're making out like teenagers, rolling around on the floor while the saints avert their eyes and the last rays of the setting sun cast a fading golden glow over everything in the church. When they finally calm back down, both of them are red-mouthed and covered in hickeys. 

Steve spoons up behind him, his lips brushing a fresh bite mark behind Bucky's ear. "Nice to have some of these I can smile when I look at," he says softly. His hands are still wandering, like he wants to touch every inch of Bucky's body, in spite of of everything that's been done to it and everything it's been used to do. It's a strange feeling. Bucky's used to thinking of his body as a living catalogue of horrors. But Steve looks at it and sees something else, so Bucky realizes with some surprise that he doesn't mind letting Steve look.

He still can't keep himself from flinching when Steve's lips land on the place where his metal arm joins his shoulder. "I'll go get our clothes," he mumbles. "Wouldn't want Dmitri and his buddies walking in on us naked tomorrow morning."

Steve wraps an arm around him to keep him in place. Incredibly, he keeps on kissing the ugly mess of scar tissue and medical horrors that made him go green in the gills the first time he got an up-close look at it. "If you're about to try and convince me mine are worth the attention but yours aren't, don't bother," Steve says, and runs his tongue along the seam where metal meets flesh.

"Don't feel like you have to—"

Steve nips lightly at one of the raised scars. "Maybe I _want_ to, dummy. Maybe all the blood you've lost is sacred too."

Bucky knows better than to try and argue with Steve Rogers on that point. It's just as much of a losing battle now as it was when Steve was a snot-nosed fourth-grader glaring defiance as he limped away after a back-alley fight. And as infuriating as Steve can be, Bucky's pretty sure he wouldn't have it any other way.

So he lies there in the gathering dark and lets Steve seek out all the parts of him that have been defiled, lets him consecrate them with kisses and reverent touches. As the night comes on, the ever-watchful painted saints are spared the sight of their intimacies. But for the first time, Bucky wonders whether their eyes are averted out of disgust or out of respect.

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to the denizens of the #hydratrashparty IRC channel who helped midwife and beta this fic, especially preved-medved, hyperthetical, stoatsandwich, feanorinleatherpants, stereowire, trill_gutterbug, and justanotherstonyfan.
> 
> Visual inspiration for the abandoned church primarily from [this beautiful set of photos](http://englishrussia.com/2013/07/01/old-abandoned-russian-church/).
> 
> The opening quote is from the Gettysburg Address.
> 
> Yes, the author is aware of the conflation of Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the sinner who anoints Jesus' feet. If Bucky's aware of it, he doesn't give enough fucks to pass up a chance to be flippant.
> 
> For more Hydra Trash Party and soft blasphemy aesthetic, [come find me on Tumblr](http://shinelikethunder.tumblr.com).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Hallowed Ground](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8114551) by [sallysparrow017](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sallysparrow017/pseuds/sallysparrow017)
  * [Hallowed Ground](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10915527) by [FallingStarProductions](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FallingStarProductions/pseuds/FallingStarProductions)




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